Nola Tinsley Willeford is one of the matriarchs of Adairville. She enjoys telling stories from her childhood involving the special family she loves so much.

The evening entertainment at our house in the days before electricity consisted principally of listening to Mama read to the family. She was an excellent reader who could make the characters seem to come to life. A big bowl of popcorn would be shared as the children and Daddy listened. The popcorn popper with its long handle would have to be shaken vigorously over the fire to keep the corn from scorching.

We sat in the middle bedroom, not in the living room where a fire was only kept on special occasions. Fires were kept upstairs where JT, Tuck, Wilkey and Houston slept, in the back bedroom where Mother and Dad slept, and in the middle bedroom where RK and I slept. (Daddy had another bedroom built on the house after Marizu was born and Zu and I shared it.) Of course, there was a big wood-burning stove in the kitchen that stayed warm. It had a tank that held water kept hot for washing dishes, shampooing hair, bathing, whatever.

The boys liked to hear Zane Grey’s books and we had nearly all of them. Mama also read,Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, Trail of the Lonesome Pine, and JT particularly remembers a book that was full of laughs called Slow Train Through Arkansas .

The family’s other entertainment was listening to the Edison Victrola. It was an upright, about five feet tall with a big horn just below the turntable. The records were about a half an inch thick and were jigs, reels, and popular music of the time. One of my favorites was called “You’re in Kentucky as Sure as You’re Born”. It was JT and
Tuck’s job to change the record and wind up the victrola. They really disliked this duty, which was a constant interruption to whatever they were doing. They had to stop, jump up, turn the record over, wind it, and then all too soon do it again, over and over.

What a relief it was when the radio came along! Their job with it was much easier. Once a week they took it to Mr. Clark Harper, who had a battery charger that kept all the radios in Adairville going. JT and Tuck took our radio to him every Friday. That was so that the reception would be nice and strong for the weekend.

Radios were not yet being run by electric power. Cars were still being cranked. In 1926 Daddy bought our first car that was operated by a battery. Cranking a car was hazardous duty because when the motor caught the car would jump toward the person cranking it, and if he didn’t jump out of the way in time; he was likely to get his arm broken.

Electricity came to Adairville at about the time that I was born in 1925. It was brought to Adairville from Tennessee and for many years there was an office on the square in Adairville for the Tennessee Light and Power Company. The sub station was near where the water treatment plant now is, behind our house. Clark Harper and Hadley Hampton ran it. JT said that sometimes they had big blowouts that shook that end of town! Daddy had the inside of our house wired soon after the sub station was built. A few months later, that same year he had the barn and the smokehouse wired and put a light on our front porch.

Daddy had one brother who never married. His name was Ulysses Gold Tinsley, and we called him “Uncle Lys”. As a child he had had a bad case of measles that had settled in his eyes and he was almost blind. He lived with his parents until they died. After that he spent most of his time with his oldest sister, Aunt Roma, and her family, but he visited among the other family members quite often.

Once when Daddy had gone down to Dawson Springs to visit Mother’s parents and Aunt Roma’s family he bought a cow. We always had a milk cow that the boys took care of and milked so that we had plenty of milk, butter, and homemade cottage cheese for our family. There were no trucks for hauling animals then and Uncle Lys was to drive the cow about ninety miles to Adairville. This was a slower, safer, hospitable time and Uncle Lys would stop wherever he was when the day was over and spend the night with people who lived along the way.

One night he stopped at a fellow’s house who was a bachelor and who liked to tip the jug. They got roaring drunk and the cow wandered off and was nowhere to be seen the next morning. Uncle Lys lost a whole day looking for the cow but finally found and retrieved her. Daddy was beginning to get a little worried before Uncle Lys reached Adairville, having been on the road a week.

When Uncle Lys visited his sister in Birmingham or his sister in St. Louis, he hopped a freight train and traveled free. The boys loved for him to come for a visit, as he would tell them tales about “riding the rails”.